Quickies: QtRuby, amaroK, Create, Ging

There is an audio interview with Caleb Tennis author of the new book Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby. *** amaroK started their fundraising drive. *** Newsforge reports on Create @ Freedesktop the new project to bring together graphics projects including Scribus and Krita, meanwhile Open Clip Art Library 0.18 was released. *** Ging released 0.1.0 of their Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Live CD based on KDE.

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by Daniel "Suslik" D. (not verified)

The point about the SOHO, SMB market is very agreeable, until you actually dive into it. Once you are there the buiseness owners only care about "compatibility with major business software". This means, they dont give a rats ass about Free. What they value is the ability to run QuickBooks, FedEx shipping software, junk-mailing plugins for Outlook and other 3rd party soft. Small businesses buy computers to run functional, off the shelf applications, not share files and browse all day.

Until linux has actual QuickBooks and the family, SOHO Desktop is an unclimbable castle for FOSS. Talking about going in circles.

I agree. Linux makes sense for SMBs only if they have cheap access to unix expertise, in which case reduced maintenance costs (spyware, AV etc) can marginally outweigh the initial productivity loss introduced by fewer available off-the-shelf applications. Same for SOHO, maybe less so for skilled IT consultancies with in-house expertise.

When a linux setup really shines is in medium-to-big organizations, where maintainance and business needs operate on a bigger scale. It's much more pleasant to administer 500 unix/linux boxes than 500 quirky Windows 2000/XP/2003/everything-goes... But still, unix expertise shortage is an issue.